It’s been nearly 6 years since I released v1.0 of Top 10. What started as a simple plugin to track your popular posts and display your top posts has evolved into one of the most popular “popular posts” plugins for WordPress used on thousands of blogs today! Versions between 1.0 and 1.9.10 have added support for thumbnails, custom post types, custom styles and more.

Today I unveil the latest, the greatest and the best version of Top 10 – The Popular Posts plugin for WordPress. v2.0.1 brings long pending support for WordPress multisite, better site compatibility and tracking, a cleaner admin interface and support for addons as well as some miscellaneous bug fixes. v2.0.1 also fixes a major bug that broke sites upgrading to v2.1.

The upgrade is available for all users from with your WordPress Admin. Remember to empty your caches from plugins like WP Super Cache to ensure that the new tracking scripts are added to your pages instead of the old tracking script. If you’re using Cloudflare, I recommend activating the Cache Fix in the settings page.

Contextual Related Posts, Top 10 and Where did they go from here have come inbuilt with TimThumb to resize images for a long time now. However, TimThumb has had a fair share of exploits that have affected a lot of websites and although I’ve maintained the latest version of TimThumb consistently within the plugins, it required me to be on the lookout constantly for updates to TimThumb.

Ben has supported the development of TimThumb over the years, but announced that he has stopped supporting or maintaining it. This means that eventually, I’m going to drop TimThumb from my WordPress plugins.

Contextual Related Posts v2.0 comes inbuilt with complete support for WordPress thumbnails In the next version, you’ll be able to select the inbuilt created thumbnail sizes, instead of creating a new one. This means even better support for your thumbnails, especially if you’re carving your own ones! v2.1 will remove TimThumb completely and the plugin will no longer bundle it.

I’m currently working on new versions of Top 10 and Where did they go from here and these will come with the WordPress thumbnails support out of the box as well as the option to select existing thumbnail sizes.

If you’d still like to use TimThumb, you’ll need to host this on your own and use a simple function to filter the post image. This is, in fact, how my plugins currently use TimThumb to resize the images. But, as Ben says, this will be at your own risk.

I know that this is definitely a big change. I’ve always liked how TimThumb could seamlessly resize images on the fly, but with lack of support and maintenance, it’s time to stop using it.

Last week I released a major update to Contextual Related Posts. Given the size of the update, I’ve tagged the latest version as 2.0, heralding a new direction in the further development of this plugin.

v2.x brings multi-site support, WordPress thumbnails and a more powerful API. It also has several minor bug fixes and cleaner code.

Multi-site support

One feature that has been missing from Contextual Related Posts has been multisite support, mainly in terms of a Network Activate feature. With the Network Activate feature enabled, a multi-site admin can choose if he wants to activate Contextual Related Posts across all sites in the network or let users activate the plugin independently on their site.

Network Activate Contextual Related Posts

Once you network activate the plugin, it will no longer show up in the Plugins page of the individual sites. However, users can visit Settings » Related Posts as usual to configure the plugin. If you don’t Network Activate the plugin, it will show up on individual sites and the site admin can choose to activate the plugin if he/she so chooses.

WordPress thumbnails

CRP has had support for timthumb for a long time and by default timthumb was used to create thumbnails. Although timthumb gives you much better control on thumbnail resizing, it does add slightly higher processing on the servers since the images are created on the fly.

Many users have requested to include support for WordPress’ inbuilt image resizing and this feature has found it’s way in v2.0 of Contextual Related Posts.

Thumbnail options in Contextual Related Posts 2.0

Contextual Related Posts will add a new image size called crp_thumbnail based on the settings above. This means WordPress will create a copy of the image with the specified dimensions when a new image is uploaded. By default, this is set to proportionally crop the image. i.e. the image will first be resized so that the max dimension is as per the above i.e. 150px. You can optionally choose to hard crop the image by enabling the crop mode above. This will cause the image to be cropped to the exact dimensions but this might result in some part of the image being chopped off.

In either case, I strongly suggest running a regenerate plugin like Force Regenerate Thumbnails to recreate the image sizes for your older images. I especially like this plugin because it deletes the old and unneeded image sizes that would have been created in the past and are unnecessarily occupying space on your server.

Extended API

In version 2.0.0, I’ve added several new filters and actions that will allow other plugins / themes or addons to talk to Contextual Related Posts. What’s currently missing is the documentation which I shall be working on over the next several weeks.

If you’re interested in the API, take a look at my new plugin Contextual Related Ports Taxonomy Tools. Available for free from WordPress.org, CRP Taxonomy Tools adds support for restricting posts to the same categories and tags of the current post.

CRP Taxonomy Tools

This is also a working example of the API that adds settings to Contextual Related Posts and also filters the post query.

Contextual Related Posts on Transifex.

Contextual Related Posts is now on Transifex, ready for translation courtesy the WP Translations. WP-Translations is the place where you will find a number of WordPress amazing Plugins and Themes to make them available in your home language. In exchange you will receive credit for your work and will certainly make part of the WP community history in your country.

Closing words

As usual, if you’ve got any questions please open a support ticket in the WordPress.org forums. It allows me to answer your question quickly and more efficiently. Emailing me your support query or writing it in a comment is most likely going to be missed due to volume of emails I receive.

If you’re an existing user of the plugin, do consider writing a review. WordPress developers are welcome to contribute to the plugin via GitHub. Create an issue or fork the plugin and submit a pull request for me to review.

And, before I forget, Contextual Related Posts also has a brand new header.

Detailed changes in 2.x

2.0.1

Fixed: Clear Cache button which broke in 2.0.0

2.0.0

New: Multi-site support. Now you can Network Activate the plugin and all users will see related posts!

New: Thumbnails are registered as an image size in WordPress. This means WordPress will create a copy of the image with the specified dimensions when a new image is uploaded. For your existing images, I recommend using Force Regenerate Thumbnails

New: Completely filterable mySQL query to fetch the posts. You can write your own functions to filter the fields, orderby, groupby, join and limits clauses

Modified: Lookup priority for thumbnails. The thumbnail URL set in the Contextual Related Posts meta box is given first priority

I’ve released Better Search v1.3.4 today. The biggest addition which has long been pending is the addition of a meta tag that will allow you to set the search results page to stop being indexed. Enabled by default, you can choose to disable the meta tag if needed.

This should be definitely better for SEO and recommended by Google. Setting the meta tag should eventually stop Google and other search engines from unnecessarily indexing the search results pages.

This plugin also adds support for Rocket Loader and fixes some minor bugs in the heatmap. I’ve also added a brand new header image for the plugin listed in the WordPress.org directory. How does it look?